Okay. So to try to tie this better back to the OP.
I want to reconcile the fact that my “common sense” morality includes “don’t steal from people, even the outgroup”, but “seems like empires are basically built out of theft (among other things) and like they were a key piece of how I even got my morality in the first place.”
And I think I was okay with “in practice, the way I got my morality was messy and build on atrocities, but at least I have a sense of how to do things going forward.” But the notion that “in principle, it may not have even been possible to get my morality without it being built on atrocities” is somehow deeply unsettling to me.
And maybe what I’m supposed to do is just grieve for that and move on with my day.
But I think not. Because I think we’re not necessarily done with empires needing to be built on (what I consider) immoral actions, for the greater good. (Or: it will probably turn out that at least some immoral empires will generate more goodness than could have been generated alternatively)
But it’s not like commonsense morality is meaningless. Theft is still bad for all the reasons it’s normally bad. I don’t want to stop punishing people for theft. Empires (which includes various large corporations) aren’t automatically for the greater good, so the rule of “you get punished for theft unless you’re too powerful” doesn’t actually solve anything even if my.
So the point of the previous comment was to grope towards “what norm do I actually want everyone to try to enforce, that has a shot at successfully applying to empires? Ideally that empire leaders should actually want to help enforce to create a higher-order incentive landscape?”
In a simpler ecosystem of individual agents, I think a reasonable principle is something like “it’s potentially okay for Alice to violate some norms to gain resources and accomplish a goal, if Alice later ‘makes good’ by paying some appropriate fine (ideally to the people who were harmed by her norm violation).”
But, this is much harder to apply to...
...vague-blobs of agents (who is useful to blame for crimes against the Irish? The current prime minister? The descendants of Oliver Cromwell? Whichever lower level official carried out various actions?)
...agents who are now dead (is there any way I can meaningfully punish Oliver Cromwell?)
...messy situations with lots of back and forth small crimes that escalated (My vague history sense is that England tried to stamp out Catholicism in Ireland, but I’m assuming the original Catholic settlers tried to stamp out other native practices, and everyone probably did random cattle raiding or conquest in various directions)
...
Thinking through this led me to some potential solutions:
It feels more robust to reward people who do good* than to punish people who do bad. It’s neither fair nor particularly possible to punish people who hadn’t been part of my moral framework, who’s deeds are mostly lost to the mists of time (and this is symmetrical for future people who might not share my framework but judge me by theirs)
Hmm. I guess I don’t necessarily want to punish people who did wrong, but I would ideally like to compensate people who were wronged.
A thing I can aim for for myself is to be the sort of person who tracks when I end up violating what I think should be a norm, and work to make it right in some way.
A thing I can also aim for myself is to work to ensure that organizations I participate in are robust, coherent organizations that are easier to audit and assign credit in, so I don’t contribute to a vague blob that’s hard to hold accountable.
There is something nice about the virtue of “ensuring that there is a record”, and being legible to historians. This enables future people, who might have a lot more resources, to allocate some kind of future rewards for people who put effort into making their organizations legible/coherent/agenty, and who attempted to do good with their imperial winnings.
(sufficiently advanced posthumans can solve this by literally implementing simulated ancestor heaven, and if that turns out to be intractable, you can instead do things like “figure out what someone
While thinking through all of this, one thing I found myself thinking of were things like slave reparations. Up until 10 minutes ago I was thinking something like “I think this has made me more pro-reparations”. The thought I had just now was “actually, the problem with reparations right now is that America/UK/whoever are too much of a vague messy blob to institute any morally complex norm reconciliation, and the primary thing to focus on if you’re worried about righting-past-wrongs is to help build a more coherent, agenty world that’s capable of doing anything on purpose at all.”
A thing this reminds me of is that Robert Moses (city planner for early-mid 20th century NYC) did a bunch of horrible destructive (and often racist) things in the service of, among other things, highways. And those things were horribly destructive (and often racist), but I kinda suspect that if he’d done them in the name of mass transit a lot of the people condemning him would be saying “man of his times, what can you do?” and “can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs”, unless people were unhappy with the results of more mass transit/fewer highways in this alternate NYC, at which point they’d go back to condemning him for all the things we condemn him for now.
I would rather Moses had built mass transit rather than highways in the 30s, but I don’t think it was obviously the wrong trade-off at the time. A bunch of things looked like good ideas in the 30s and didn’t pan out.
Okay. So to try to tie this better back to the OP.
I want to reconcile the fact that my “common sense” morality includes “don’t steal from people, even the outgroup”, but “seems like empires are basically built out of theft (among other things) and like they were a key piece of how I even got my morality in the first place.”
And I think I was okay with “in practice, the way I got my morality was messy and build on atrocities, but at least I have a sense of how to do things going forward.” But the notion that “in principle, it may not have even been possible to get my morality without it being built on atrocities” is somehow deeply unsettling to me.
And maybe what I’m supposed to do is just grieve for that and move on with my day.
But I think not. Because I think we’re not necessarily done with empires needing to be built on (what I consider) immoral actions, for the greater good. (Or: it will probably turn out that at least some immoral empires will generate more goodness than could have been generated alternatively)
But it’s not like commonsense morality is meaningless. Theft is still bad for all the reasons it’s normally bad. I don’t want to stop punishing people for theft. Empires (which includes various large corporations) aren’t automatically for the greater good, so the rule of “you get punished for theft unless you’re too powerful” doesn’t actually solve anything even if my.
So the point of the previous comment was to grope towards “what norm do I actually want everyone to try to enforce, that has a shot at successfully applying to empires? Ideally that empire leaders should actually want to help enforce to create a higher-order incentive landscape?”
In a simpler ecosystem of individual agents, I think a reasonable principle is something like “it’s potentially okay for Alice to violate some norms to gain resources and accomplish a goal, if Alice later ‘makes good’ by paying some appropriate fine (ideally to the people who were harmed by her norm violation).”
But, this is much harder to apply to...
...vague-blobs of agents (who is useful to blame for crimes against the Irish? The current prime minister? The descendants of Oliver Cromwell? Whichever lower level official carried out various actions?)
...agents who are now dead (is there any way I can meaningfully punish Oliver Cromwell?)
...messy situations with lots of back and forth small crimes that escalated (My vague history sense is that England tried to stamp out Catholicism in Ireland, but I’m assuming the original Catholic settlers tried to stamp out other native practices, and everyone probably did random cattle raiding or conquest in various directions)
...
Thinking through this led me to some potential solutions:
It feels more robust to reward people who do good* than to punish people who do bad. It’s neither fair nor particularly possible to punish people who hadn’t been part of my moral framework, who’s deeds are mostly lost to the mists of time (and this is symmetrical for future people who might not share my framework but judge me by theirs)
Hmm. I guess I don’t necessarily want to punish people who did wrong, but I would ideally like to compensate people who were wronged.
A thing I can aim for for myself is to be the sort of person who tracks when I end up violating what I think should be a norm, and work to make it right in some way.
A thing I can also aim for myself is to work to ensure that organizations I participate in are robust, coherent organizations that are easier to audit and assign credit in, so I don’t contribute to a vague blob that’s hard to hold accountable.
There is something nice about the virtue of “ensuring that there is a record”, and being legible to historians. This enables future people, who might have a lot more resources, to allocate some kind of future rewards for people who put effort into making their organizations legible/coherent/agenty, and who attempted to do good with their imperial winnings.
(sufficiently advanced posthumans can solve this by literally implementing simulated ancestor heaven, and if that turns out to be intractable, you can instead do things like “figure out what someone
While thinking through all of this, one thing I found myself thinking of were things like slave reparations. Up until 10 minutes ago I was thinking something like “I think this has made me more pro-reparations”. The thought I had just now was “actually, the problem with reparations right now is that America/UK/whoever are too much of a vague messy blob to institute any morally complex norm reconciliation, and the primary thing to focus on if you’re worried about righting-past-wrongs is to help build a more coherent, agenty world that’s capable of doing anything on purpose at all.”
A thing this reminds me of is that Robert Moses (city planner for early-mid 20th century NYC) did a bunch of horrible destructive (and often racist) things in the service of, among other things, highways. And those things were horribly destructive (and often racist), but I kinda suspect that if he’d done them in the name of mass transit a lot of the people condemning him would be saying “man of his times, what can you do?” and “can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs”, unless people were unhappy with the results of more mass transit/fewer highways in this alternate NYC, at which point they’d go back to condemning him for all the things we condemn him for now.
I would rather Moses had built mass transit rather than highways in the 30s, but I don’t think it was obviously the wrong trade-off at the time. A bunch of things looked like good ideas in the 30s and didn’t pan out.
[Source: primarily The Power Broker].